Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd., best known for its Panasonic brand of consumer electronics and digital communications products, announced it has developed a new graphic processor MN67762, or GRiTT-2, which is a welcome addition to its GRiTT processor series.

The new processor establishes the basis for designing system architectures and boosts the graphic performance of such devices as car navigation systems. With a variety of graphic capabilities and extensive interfaces, GRiTT-2 provides better functioning and performance to devices that require sophisticated graphic user interfaces including car navigation systems, on-board information and amusement devices.

The GRiTT-2 processor incorporates a newly developed advanced pixel processing circuit, giving various graphic effects ranging from conventional Gouraud shading and alpha blending to special effects such as fog, specular and anti-aliasing. It supports the Double Data Rate Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory (DDR-SDRAM), improving memory access speed up to a maximum of double the previous model's capability. It also adopts a high-speed light source processing calculation with a floating-point operation circuit to enable faster and more effective graphic shading.

Including patents pending, Matsushita possesses 31 Japanese and five foreign patents on the new processor. Sample shipments are scheduled for July 2004 at a unit price of 10,000 yen.

The new processor GRiTT-2 will be exhibited at the Embedded Systems Expo & Conference in Tokyo (ESEC), July 7-9, 2004, at Tokyo International Exhibition Center (The Tokyo Big Sight).